Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My journey to this House was through a pathway of activism, and it was actually the pandemic that turned me into a medical activist due to the egregious breaches of work health and safety that I witnessed in hospitals in the early days of the pandemic. These were due to insufficient respiratory protection and PPE. From being an activist, I've now taken a career change, you could say, and I'm now in this House in order to drive change. So it gives me great pleasure today to speak in support of the Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill 2022, which makes amendments to the Work Health and Safety Act.

However, I'm not going to be speaking about COVID or a respiratory virus. I am going to be speaking about another respiratory condition which is affecting hundreds of thousands of Australians. It relates to engineered stone. Like millions of Australians, I chose the gleaming stone benchtop in my kitchen because it was hard-wearing and aesthetically pleasing and did not need the maintenance of marble. Many years later, it continues to withstand the pressures of a busy household where children have grown up into teenagers. What I did not know when I made this purchase was that it harbours a dirty little secret: engineered stone is killing workers in the stonemason industry, who are developing an irreversible fibrotic condition called silicosis. It has given engineered stone the moniker of being the asbestos of the 2020s.

Engineered stone is a man-made composite of different materials held together by polymer resin. Unlike natural stone, engineered stone contains a far higher content of crystalline silica at over 90 per cent compared with granite, which has 30 per cent, and marble, which has just 13 per cent. The cutting process makes silica airborne. It is then inhaled by workers and even bystanders who may not be directly involved in the cutting process.

One tragic case I met was that of a young mother, Sally, who had developed silicosis while working as a receptionist at a stonemasonry. She looked the picture of health from the outside—in fact, she looked glowing—but she experienced breathlessness when walking distances that should not affect a woman in her 30s. Apart from exertional breathlessness, she was weighed down by anxiety about her children's future, crushing uncertainty and mounting medical bills on a single household income. Sally was brought to my attention by a delegation from the ACTU and a colleague and friend, Dr Kate Cole, the President of the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists and a tireless campaigner for better worker protections, who collectively are demanding an outright ban on artificial stone.

Silicosis is no joke. When lung transplantation is the only option, then every lever must be pulled to prevent this disease because lung transplantation is no joke either. I worked for 13 years at the Alfred Hospital, Australia's leading lung transplant centre. There I worked closely with the first-class lung transplant multidisciplinary team where I helped manage one of the dual threats to patients with lung transplantation—infection. The other, of course, is rejection, and it usually catches up with patients provided that infection doesn't get them first.

Lung transplantation is a scarce intervention that is rationed, and, although it does not confer a normal life expectancy, it is lifesaving for those lucky few who are eligible for it. But it is no picnic. It's one of the most gruelling procedures to go through and requires a lifetime of constant medical monitoring.

Wet cutting of stone is not universal. Neither is good ventilation, nor well-fitting masks, called respirators, for workers—the same ones that I used to wear on the wards. Awareness of silicosis is poor. If knowledge is power, then these workers are disempowered. Poor working conditions are rife, overseen by unscrupulous operators who force workers to dry cut the stone.

Queensland was the first state to ban dry cutting of engineered stone in 2018. Victoria followed in 2019 and New South Wales in 2020. But, by then, the damage was done. Surveillance studies from 2021 in Queensland and Victoria have found that nearly one in five workers in the industry have developed silicosis, and they are in the prime of their lives—diagnosed at an average age of 41 years. Some are developing it as little as three years after exposure.

It is important to note that silica is ubiquitous; it is all throughout the earth's crust. Hence, workers in mines and quarries are also at risk. I know something about airborne threats. As I said, I fought for better respiratory protection for healthcare workers when COVID hit, and we were heard.

What is facing stonemasons is a pandemic of neglect. Our insatiable appetite for engineered stone has led to short cuts in working conditions in the quest to meet demand and profit. At least 600 stonemasons and workers in other trades like the tunnelling industry have been diagnosed with silicosis since 2018, of whom 175 are in Victoria. However, this is the tip of an iceberg, with Curtin University estimating that are at least 103,000 people with silicosis. It is a hidden, human tragedy. Some of these workers will be unaware of their diagnosis, but all will eventually develop symptoms—all of them.

Campaigners are demanding a ban on engineered stone, more stringent work health and safety laws and better enforcement with adequate staffing of compliance work. For example, the New South Wales government reported that there were 60 inspections of manufactured stone businesses in 2022, but with at least 250 facilities there is a really long time—a big gap—between these inspections for what are high-risk sites.

Given the scale of the problem, the challenges of compliance and its devastating health effects, which are much like getting a terminal diagnosis, campaigners believe that engineered stone should be banned, and so do I.

We have heeded the call, and this legislation is part of our overarching agenda to improve the wellbeing of workers. The Work Health and Safety Amendment Bill implements some of the 34 recommendations from the Boland review in 2018 by Marie Boland, a former executive director of SafeWork SA. It languished under the former government, but we have dusted it off and are starting the work of implementation to make Australian workplaces safer. This bill lowers the bar for conviction of shonky operators. It includes negligence as a threshold, which means that both reckless and grossly negligent employers who expose workers to serious risks will face penalties.

The bill prevents a person who is required to pay a penalty under the law from recovering that penalty under insurance. For example, a Victorian company in 2022 was fined $31,000 for failing to provide proper controls to reduce exposure to silica dust, a cost that could have been recovered from an insurance claim. We want to ensure that a serious work health and safety incident does not get reduced to the cost of doing business. A person's life, no matter the person's age but especially in the prime of their lives, is not a line item on a budget balance sheet. Prohibiting such insurance claims will help to concentrate the minds of businesses on taking their work health and safety obligations seriously. The bill also allows easier sharing of information with Safe Work Australia to maintain important datasets on traumatic injury and compensation claims, which will inform better policy made here. In 2021, 169 people lost their lives at work—169 lives too many. It is hoped that the future introduction of industrial manslaughter legislation will help to bolster the deterrent effect of this amendment.

Finally, being safe at work means physical safety as well as psychological safety, and that boils down to workplace culture. A workplace with a consultative non-combative culture is also a much safer one. Workers and managers need not to be in opposition but to be figuring out solutions together. An asymmetric power dynamic means that workers are automatically at a disadvantage, which is why we have work health and safety laws in the first place. These laws mandate consultation. They also ensure that people in the hot zone who have skin in the game, much as I did when I was on the wards, are empowered to speak up on matters relating to work health and safety. Had I known then what I know now, I would have stuck with steel or wood or some other safer alternative, like natural stone. Strengthening work health and safety laws is one side of the equation, with consumer activism the other.

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